Pretty happy with my appearance this weekend on our local public affairs show discussing HB2 and elections in NC. I’ve cut down the excess gesturing that does not play well on TV. Next time will try to limit “you know.” That said, I think I had some pretty decent stuff to say.

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Love this Washington Post gallery of photos of the Solar System and beyond:

Geyser-like jets of water vapor, gas and ice spurt from the southern pole of Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, suggesting that the icy moon has a subsurface ocean with volcanic activity on the sea floor.NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

2) More evidence showing that it’s much better to be a 6th gradernot in a middle school.

3) Ross Douthat with a very thought-provoking column on Clinton’s “Samantha Bee” problem. This provoked a lot of interesting social media discussion among my professor friends.

But the Democratic Party’s problem in the age of Trump isn’t really Jimmy Fallon. Its problem is Samantha Bee.

Not Bee alone, of course, but the entire phenomenon that she embodies: the rapid colonization of new cultural territory by an ascendant social liberalism.

The culture industry has always tilted leftward, but the swing toward social liberalism among younger Americans and the simultaneous surge of activist energy on the left have created a new dynamic, in which areas once considered relatively apolitical now have (or are being pushed to have) an overtly left-wing party line…

At the same time, outside the liberal tent, the feeling of being suffocated by the left’s cultural dominance is turning voting Republican into an act of cultural rebellion — which may be one reason the Obama years, so good for liberalism in the culture, have seen sharp G.O.P. gains at every level of the country’s government.

6) And speaking of which, Trump’s tax plans would cause deficits to explode. But nobody cares because it’s Trump and policy.

7) Drew Magery knows he’s not going to convince any Trump voters, so he just unloads with what he really thinks:

Nothing that Trump says, no damning piece of Trump reportage, and certainly no opinion piece like this one will stop his voters from pulling the lever. Nor will anything stop Trump from being the officious, braindead goon that he is. He will never answer for his crimes, and there’s a frighteningly large portion of the electorate that will always love him for that.

And so I’d just like to say to that portion of the electorate: Fuck you. No, seriously. Go fuck yourselves. I’m not gonna waste any more time trying to convince you that you’re about to do something you’ll regret forever. I’m not gonna show you old clips of Trump saying rotten things. I’m not gonna try to ANNIHILATE Trump by showing you records of his hypocrisy and greed. I’m not gonna link to a John Oliver clip and be like, “THIS. So much this.” Nothing’s gonna take down Trump at this point, so I’m not gonna bother. No no, this post is for ME. I am preaching to the sad little choir in my soul here.

Because while Trump is a miserable bastard, YOU are the people who have handed him the bullhorn. YOU are the people willing to embarrass this nation and put it on the brink of economic ruin all because you wanna throw an electoral hissy fit. YOU are the people who want to revolutionize the way America does business by voting for its worst businessman, a disgusting neon pig who only makes money when he causes problems for other people instead of solving them. YOU are the thin-skinned yokels who clutch your bandoliers whenever someone hurls the mildest of slurs at you (“deplorables”), while cheering Trump on as he leaves a bonfire of truly hateful invective everywhere he goes. YOU are the people willing to overlook the fact that Trump is an unqualified, ignorant sociopath because DURRRR HILLARY IS BAD TOO DURRRR.

9) And Adam Gopnik on New Yorker’s non-terrorized response to terrorism.

10) Kevin Drum on who Republican elites listen to summed up in a single chart:

11) Ed Yong with a really nice piece on the inevitable survival of the fittest of bad science (it’s all about the bad incentives).

12) I’ve never been one to fool myself by thinking getting food off the floor in less than five seconds will render it bacteria free (the latest research suggests decidedly not), yet, I figure I would think nothing of picking up a pencil off the floor than eating some food. So, I’ll just count on my immune system– it’s worked well so far.

13) Political Scientist and media critic extraordinaire, Thomas Patterson, on the media coverage of Trump and Clinton:

IF Hillary Clinton loses the presidential election in November, we will know the reason. The email controversy did her candidacy in. But it needed a helping hand — and the news media readily supplied that.

My analysis of media coverage in the four weeks surrounding both parties’ national conventions found that her use of a private email server while secretary of State and other alleged scandal references accounted for 11% of Clinton’s news coverage in the top five television networks and six major newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. Excluding neutral reports, 91% of the email-related news reports were negative in tone. Then, there were the references to her character and personal life, which accounted for 4% of the coverage; that was 92% negative. [emphasis mine]

While Trump declared open warfare on the mainstream media — and of late they have cautiously responded in kind — it has been Clinton who has suffered substantially more negative news coverage throughout nearly the whole campaign.

14) Just in case you didn’t hear about the Trump county chair in Ohio who said that racism was over in America until Obama brought it back.

15) It’s from just about a year ago, but this Brendan Nyhan piece on the media’s misguided search for “authenticity” is great.

16) Paul Waldman asks if Trump is running the sleaziest foundation in America? Hell, yes! The fact that pretty much only the Post is taking this issue seriously is perhaps the largest media failure of the campaign.

In case you haven’t been following the story of the Trump Foundation, that last part is critical: Trump has given zero dollars to the Trump Foundation since 2009. Instead, he gets other rich people to donate money to the foundation, and he then uses their money for self-aggrandizement and sometimes self-enrichment. As Fahrenthold has documented, Trump has used foundation money for things like buying a six-foot-tall painting of himself, sometimes at charity events held at Mar-a-Lago, where he charges the charity for use of the facility, which means that not only is he not making the donation for which everyone is praising him, he’s actually making money on the deal. And then of course there’s the conveniently timed, illegal $25,000 donation from the foundation to Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, which was followed quickly by her decision not to join a lawsuit charging Trump with fraud over Trump University.

We’ll have to see if the IRS investigates the self-dealing Fahrenthold has identified and what kinds of fines might result. But one of the many striking details in this story is the shock experts in nonprofit and foundation law express when they hear about how Trump uses the Trump Foundation. “I represent 700 nonprofits a year, and I’ve never encountered anything so brazen,” one lawyer told Fahrenthold. “If he’s using other people’s money — run through his foundation — to satisfy his personal obligations, then that’s about as blatant an example of self-dealing [as] I’ve seen in a while.”

17) No, immigrants are not taking jobs from Americans (says the latest study).

18) Dahlia Lithwick on why Hillary should not stoop to Trump’s level in the debate:

But it seems to me the real challenge for Clinton is that she must stand on a stage and debate the single most awful political person in modern American consciousness. Trying to stifle the impulse just to walk across the stage and belt him in the face would seem an insurmountable task. Add to that the fact that Clinton is expected to speak and listen, and it seems beyond human capability.

When considering these obstacles, Clinton should realize that she has one sole job in these debates: Be the grownup. She doesn’t need to be funny. (She isn’t.) She doesn’t need to be emotional—that’s how the deeply unfortunate “basket of deplorables” remark happened. She doesn’t have to bend over backward to be charming or personable. Her job is to ignore the crazy circus monkey with the broken cymbals and do what she does best: Listen carefully, respond reasonably, and speak to the part of America that truly understands what it means to entrust someone with the nuclear codes.

19) Short Term 12 is a sweet little movie you probably never heard of. It’s streaming on Netflix and it’s really good.

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Ezra Klein wrote a piece this summer (which I’ve linked multiple times and surely will again) about how this election was really normal vs. abnormal. One big problem is just how much we have acclimated to Trump’s abnormality. Chait has an interesting take arguing that another big problem is that the media is also abnormalizing Hillary Clinton:

Americans deem Clinton less honest and trustworthy than a man who lies in public about opponents in both parties with a frequency and brazenness unsurpassed in national politics, who has broken precedent by refusing to disclose his tax returns, who routinely refused to pay contractors for services rendered, who abused a charitable foundation for personal and political gain, who once boasted in a best-selling book about his habit of lying, and who is currently facing trial for bilking thousands of victims in a massive fraud. [emphases mine]

Clinton, as I have conceded, has done some bad things born of secrecy and paranoia. But those bad things have not merely tainted her image but defined it. The email story has utterly dominated the public’s impression of Clinton, who is the second-most-unpopular nominee of all time and whose shortcomings compare in the public mind with those of her grossly unqualified, authoritarian opponent. Open up any interview with undecided voters, and you will find them equating Trump’s shocking lack of qualifications with Clinton’s mundane transparency issues. (For instance, this Florida voter: “Mr. Trump scares him, Mr. Lewis said. Mrs. Clinton, he believes, is dissembling about her health. He, too, is considering sitting out the election.”) The ongoing normalization of Trump is the most disorienting development of the presidential campaign, but the most significant may be the abnormalization of Clinton.

The news media’s obsession with the emails has, without necessarily intending to do so, conveyed the impression that Clinton committed not just run-of-the-mill political scandals but extraordinary offenses of a historic scale. Indeed, this is exactly what most Republicans, even staunch critics of Trump, believe — for all of Trump’s flaws, she too is disqualified…

The funny thing about the scandal surrounding Clinton’s private email account is that there was a similar scandal in the Bush administration. Dozens of White House staffers, including Karl Rove, improperly used email accounts provided by the Republican National Committee, which were supposed to be for political work only, for their official duties, thus evading public-records requirements. They then deleted some 22 million emails, thus systematically flouting the same public-records principle that Clinton evaded.

If you forgot about this episode, it is because it was merely a secondary scandal within a larger one, involving a Bush administration scheme to politicize the Department of Justice…

But even if we saddle Hillary Clinton with every ethical failure of her husband’s administration alongside her own tenure as secretary of State, and include those of the Clinton post-presidency, it simply does not compare with Bush’s. And it should go without saying that the comparison does not excuse Clinton’s very real failures of ethics and judgment. Yet the question is not whether Clinton’s ethics problems exist at all but whether they ought to separate her from normal politicians. The inability to contextualize these flaws has been a signal failure of the general election.

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1) We’ve got some gasoline shortages here in NC. There’d be an easy solution– higher prices. But instead of higher prices, anti-gouging laws prevent the marketplace from working and we end up not with costlier gasoline, but no gas at all. Great old post from Mike Munger about the problem with anti-gouging laws that he re-posted this week due to the present circumstances. Rob Schofield, whom I generally agree with, points out that we can expect conservatives to come out and defend price “gouging,” but does not actually provide any argument for why these laws do more good than harm.

5) Really interesting case heading the Supreme Court’s way on racial bias among jurors pitting the secrecy of deliberations versus the problem of racism.

6) Back when I was young and unwise and attended a top-ranked college, I thought college rankings were great. Now I know better. So does Frank Bruni.

One of the main factors in a school’s rank is how highly officials at peer institutions and secondary-school guidance counselors esteem it. But they may not know it well. They’re going by its reputation, established in no small part by previous U.S. News evaluations. A lofty rank perpetuates itself.

Another main factor is the percentage of a school’s students who graduate within six years. But this says as much about a school’s selectiveness — the proven achievement and discipline of the students it admits — as about its stewardship of them.

7) Apparently missing emails are a lot more important for Hillary Clinton than George W. Bush.

Dear fellow white people, let’s have an honest talk about why we say “All Lives Matter.” First of all, notice that no one was saying “All Lives Matter” before people started saying “Black Lives Matter.” So “All Lives Matter” is a response to “Black Lives Matter.” Apparently, something about the statement “Black Lives Matter” makes us uncomfortable. Why is that?

Now some white people might say that singling out Black people’s lives as mattering somehow means that white lives don’t matter. Of course, that’s silly. If you went to a Breast Cancer Awareness event, you wouldn’t think that they were saying that other types of cancer don’t matter. And you’d be shocked if someone showed up with a sign saying “Colon Cancer Matters” or chanting “All Cancer Patients Matter.” So clearly, something else is prompting people to say “All Lives Matter” in response to “Black Lives Matter.”

Many of the people saying “All Lives Matter” also are fond of saying “Blue Lives Matter.” If you find that the statement “Black Lives Matter” bothers you, but not “Blue Lives Matter,” then the operative word is “Black”. That should tell us something.

11) The authors of this study suggest that this election could be bad for daughters no matter who gets elected:

Even if Hillary Clinton wins the presidential election in November, the 2016 campaign still could have profoundly negative consequences for a generation of girls exploring their own leadership potential. To be sure, electing the first female president would show American girls that women truly can overcome gender bias and win elections at the highest levels. But they will also have witnessed another truth: They will pay a price for trying.

That said, I think they are flat-out wrong and for young girls having a female president far outweighs the potential downsides. Here’s results from their survey:

A 2014 survey conducted by Making Caring Common, the project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where we are, respectively, director and faculty co-director, found that girls in middle and high school already face biases against their potential leadership from boys and girls alike. In our survey, fully 40 percent of boys and 23 percent of girls stated an explicitpreference for male over female political leaders (only 4 percent of boys and 8 percent of girls expressed an explicit preference in favor of female political leaders, with 56 percent of boys and 69 percent of girls stating no preference). Our survey also picked up male and female bias against girls as business leaders, and we found certain types of implicit bias against girls’ leadership from students and from parents.

Those are concerning. But I’m confident Hillary Clinton would do far more to shrink those gaps than enlarge them.

11) Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a Millennial problem so much as young Millennial problem. The ones old enough to have voted for Obama in 2008 are alright. Damn kids today!

The reason legislator-led prayer is permissible, they argued, is because “the principal audience for these invocations is not, indeed, the public but lawmakers themselves, who may find that a moment of prayer or quiet reflection sets the mind to a higher purpose and thereby eases the task of governing.”

Predictably, the majority takes Justice Anthony Kennedy up on his claim from Town of Greece that only prayers which “denigrate nonbelievers or religious minorities, threaten damnation, or preach conversion,” might cross the constitutional line, but anything short of prayer intended to “proselytize or disparage” must be OK. Even though, the “Christian concepts typically consisted of the closing line, such as ‘In Jesus’ name. Amen,’ ” the court finds that “these are not really Christian prayers.” The majority simply rejects that notion that multiple references to such Christian concepts might “convey the appearance of an official preference for Christianity.” Sigh…

To summarize, the mild sectarian prayer is not sectarian, and the aggressive sectarian prayer shows that non-adherents are too sensitive…

Perhaps we are past the moment in U.S. history where majorities can be persuaded that minority views are anything more than hypersensitivity, or that scoffing at these grievances will neither calm the waters, nor restore America’s former “greatness.” When we belittle others in Donald Trump’s America, it’s not just their alleged thin skin we’re dismissing. We are also signing off on using the machinery of government to marginalize disfavored groups from full participation in this country.

16) Sasha Issenberg in a nice interview says he thinks Trump’s lack of a ground game is going to hurt him. I agree. I think it quite likely Trump will under-perform his polls in a number of battleground states.

Perhaps her greatest strength is her pragmatism — her ability to build consensus and solve problems. As president, she would be flexible enough and experienced enough to cut across party lines and work productively with her political opponents. As first lady, she worked with Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) to create the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides healthcare coverage to more than 8 million children. As a senator, she was instrumental in persuading a Republican president to deliver billions of dollars in aid to New York after September 11. As secretary of State, she led the charge to persuade nations around the world to impose the tough sanctions on Iran that led to the landmark nuclear agreement, and she negotiated a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas…

Trump’s ignorance of the issues is manifest. He has called climate change “a hoax” and vowed to renegotiate the Paris climate accord. Obamacare would be repealed and replaced with “something great.” His signature proposal is to construct a wall along the southern border of the United States — and have Mexico pay the billions of dollars involved. Mexico, unsurprisingly, insists it will not. As for the 11 million immigrants already in the country illegally, they will either be rounded up and deported (though experts say that will cost billions of dollars, disrupt the economy, divide families and require massive violations of civil liberties) or perhaps some will be allowed to remain, living in the shadows.

Trump doesn’t take America’s global alliances seriously, he has cozied up to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and he has promised to bring back waterboarding “and worse.” His pronouncements, though vague and sometimes contradictory, raise the specter of an iron-fisted leader taking action based on gut impulses — rather than a president seeking common ground among citizens in a politically polarized country.

21) Chait annotates the NYT story on Trump’s debate preparation. Good stuff:

If Trump is legitimately as stupid, lazy, and childlike as his advisers portray him to be, they should stop helping him get through the debate and instead warn America not to let him become president.

22) Catherine Rampell makes the case (with numbers) that Millennials will eventually come around for Clinton. I think she’s right.

Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate for president, takes what he calls the “long-term view” of climate change. “In billions of years,” he said in 2011, “the sun is going to actually grow and encompass the Earth, right? So global warming is in our future.”

25) Your weekend long read– Andrew Sullivan on being an information addict and how it almost killed him (I resemble that information addict part, not the almost killed part).

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Nice piece on 538 looking at the power of religion and education in explaining the voting choices of white voters (with minority voters, it’s much more simple– not the party that marginalizes and disrespects them). This chart shows the power of education and religion as compared to other demographic factors (notice the minimal impact of income):

And this cool chart shows in more detail religion and education:

Interesting to see the almost mirror images at the extremes. More than 3/4 of college-educated whites who never attend church support Clinton. More than 3/4 of no-college whites who attend church weekly support Trump. Here’s your two Americas.